Topic: My doubts about anarchy - page 3. (Read 18191 times)

I read it. It's well written, but only a partial justification for anarchy because it only covers abandoning government. I agree that we ought to do so, as opposed to violently demolishing it, and that it would diminish the ability of capitalists to engage in super profitable enterprises. However, simply abolishing government isn't enough to preclude capitalists from consolidating their efforts and forming a new government to allow for super profitable enterprise again. Also, imagine that confused workers might take up arms to defend their employers in the absence of government. If these loyalties persist, or capitalists can generate new ones, after an old, large state disappears, we will simply have lots of mini-states which people could only ever inhabit at the mercy of the capitalist kings. Ultimately, anarchism will only work if, in a given society, capitalists exist in the minority if at all.

I do agree that markets will function better without government intervention, and that governments will always intervene despite the promises of their supporters. However, free markets will never exist in the presence of middlemen gatekeepers, employers, renters, usurers, people who collect more than their work entails, if they actually do any.

The other think that grates me about the article is its presumption that anarchy and natural law are one in the same.
According to the folks at NAMBLA, it's human nature for adult men to bugger little boys. I would think that if we somehow discovered that they were right, anarchists would still oppose pederasty because anarchists, first and foremost, oppose authoritarian relationships whether or not they naturally occur.

Certainly, many anarchists and capitalists believe that their philosophies describe natural law, but that does not make it so. If it should turn out that humans naturally behave capitalistically, anarchists will either continue to oppose that behavior or stop subscribing to anarchism.

Awesome.

Amen Ra 

Amen. 

Enjoyed that post!  Indeed, most current aggregations of wealth would not be able to sustain themselves in a free market.

FatherMcGruder,

I came across this post, I'm still reading it, but I'm curious about your thoughts: http://socialmemorycomplex.net/features/let-the-free-market-eat-the-rich.html

Obviously, workers will have the most affinity for those that they work most closely with. However, anarchists, as a matter of worker solidarity, will not prey on each other or other non-exploiting workers. Of course, individualists anarchists probably disdain solidarity and envision other methods.

It is not far fetched. Workers will and do have solidarity, they just have different solidarity.  The Garbage Men Workers solidarity will be different than the Programmers solidarity.  The hunter's solidarity will be different than the prey's solidarity.

Solidarity is abound and around, but its far from being uniform.

I envision a system of worker solidarity, if you could call that a system. If one anarchist sees another getting ripped-off, he will come to the other's defense. Human's can empathize, after all, so I don't think worker solidarity is very far fetched.

Blame the victim? Come to think of it, I guess Trisha Meili only has herself to blame. I mean, that's what you get for jogging in central park. Heck, that's what you get for jogging. Bitch should have ran!
Capitalists take advantage of people. Humans can choose not to be capitalists. Humans are neither foxes nor scorpions.

I've always liked this, The Private Production of Defense, seeing as most statists I encounter feel that defense is the core service that the state provides and is unable to be provided by private entities. The paper covers both defense from external threats (militia) and internal (dispute resolution).

http://infoshop.org/page/AnAnarchistFAQ

Tons of stuff, I don't have time to list all, but great free pdf books on market-anarchy here:

http://freedomainradio.com/ (maybe "Practical Anarchy" is a good place to start, he also has a great youtube channel "stefbot")
http://mises.org/ (most stuff by Rothbard is good)
http://agorism.info/ (Agorists advocate building up the untaxed counter-economy)
http://c4ss.org/ (Center for a Stateless Society: building awareness of the market anarchist alternative)

Yes. And if you simply want to make profit, it doesn't matter what anyone else is making as long as you
get your profit. This extends to any agent that is simply content with gaining in absolute terms.

However, the argument is that if you have to worry about your survival, you must also worry about relative gains.
Worrying about relative gains makes it difficult to co-operate, because it transforms the expected utility
of the co-operative outcome. If both parties are maximizing relative gains you have a zero sum game, in which you either win or lose: co-operation is pointless and possibly dangerous.
Note that I'm not saying all interactions will be of this sort, just that they will be more prominent.

Absolutely.

I agree.

The argument put forth by Hobbes and others, however, is that under anarchy your primary goal is to
survive, and you can't afford to be nice (this is a gross simplification). That is, the system forces you to behave in a certain way.
To refute this is to refute the security dilemma. I'm not saying that is not possible, but it is a concept that
has stood the test of time.

Further, an anarchical system is not like a free market at all. A free market requires the possibility of making binding agreements and having ensured property rights.
It's not impossible to make self-enforcing agreements (like using an escrow for financial transactions), given certain conditions, but it is more difficult in general.

I wouldn't agree that most conflicts end up that way, but maybe our experiences differ on this point.
You're right that a lot of them do, though.

My concern is whether the proposed anarchist solution scales or not, and whether it really can extend beyond simple transactions. I think some interests are more vital than others, and whenever those vital interests come into play you can no longer rely on voluntary compliance or good will.

Anyway,  I don't really have much more to say on this issue, but I got some of the answers I was looking for.
Can you recommend further reading on anarchist social institutions? Thanks.

Huh?  Really?  Don't most profit maximizers simply want to make profit?  The only case where I suppose what you say is valid is where there are high barriers to entry, in which case a loss to a competitor would grant you a greater share of the pie, thus bringing you close to monopoly power.  But in the case of competition with free market entry, as is the case of distributed peer-to-peer legal systems with mutually-agreed-upon 3rd party arbitration, than any effort and resources spent on damaging an opponent would make you worse off overall since other agencies that don't engage in warfare would get an advantage.


Wait, but with the current state system, don't most conflicts end up with someone pointing a gun and locking someone in a cage?  But this is not the case with mutually-agreed upon 3rd party arbitration (which is what the agorist/market-anarchists advocate) where rulings are focused on restitution (not punishment) and enforced through ostracism.

I've been pondering things like this for a while. Like the fact that most seeds are coated with a substance that passes through the digestive system. And in exchange for planting the seeds, the tree provides the flesh of the fruit. Some seeds are poisonous beneath the coating, like apple seeds (though they're unlikely to hurt humans) which are like a warning not to take the whole thing .. not to take the piss.

It's like life is in the process of negotiating terms for mutual survival .. Hmm .. Haven't totally thought this through yet, it's in my abstract musings phase.

Hmm... sounds good. Wifey, oh... wifey, come hither.

Oh, I see your argument. It is valid, until there is one fruit left and 5 animals.

Or one "head" and 5 hummingbirds, oh.. wow. what a visual. Ok, you win.

No i was pointing out that there are many cases where one species can get nurishment from another without neither being harmed, much to the contrary; the fruit tree offers the hanging fruit and the oozing nectar, and the animals in exchange help the plant with it's reproductive cycle, and no one gets hurt, much less killed. No "initiation of violence", the animal eats somthing tasty and the tree get its rocks off.

(All this talk is starting to gimme images of getting head from a hummingbird...)

Broken down isn't this: Fight or Flight

I think that he was talking about my post concerning a collective defense of a true anarchist society.  The problem being that those people or groups with the greatest resources to contribute to the collective defense against a foreign threat also are the most mobile among society, and as such, their own greatest-self-interests are unlikely to lie with the collective defenses, but rather with flight and re-establishment elsewhere.  Leaving the anarchist society gutted of capacity (relative to it's prior state) and only the lower classes to it's defense, and only because they were those who did not have the capacity to vacate before the invading hordes.  Think Katrina with an invading army.